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Videogames & Geek CultureTue, 03 Mar 2015 18:32:02 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1Sex and Psychosishttp://www.unwinnable.com/2013/10/03/sex-and-psychosis/
http://www.unwinnable.com/2013/10/03/sex-and-psychosis/#commentsThu, 03 Oct 2013 04:37:56 +0000http://www.unwinnable.com/?p=46555It is not uncommon for notable artists to cultivate signature styles. Paintings by Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, and Keith Haring are instantly recognizable, and even some game developers have established an unmistakable style in their games.

Team Ico is one example that comes to mind. Similarly, Goichi Suda – or Suda51 as he’s often known – is a high-profile developer who is seen as an auteur in the games industry. But while his artistic vision is overwhelmingly evident in the works his team produces, elements of this vision have a tendency to muddle what would otherwise become a refined, unique and compelling artistic signature.

Put simply, Suda51 is at his best when he leaves his adolescence behind.

Suda’s early defining work – and arguably his best – is Killer 7. The initially Gamecube exclusive, part of the somewhat defunct “Capcom five” that also included Viewtiful Joe and Resident Evil 4, brought Suda worldwide notoriety and introduced gamers and critics to a mind with an obvious depth of creativity that stood distantly apart from the crowd. Why? Killer 7 introduced themes of sex and psychosis amid science fiction, interesting and original expressions or violence notwithstanding. While sex would factor heavily into Suda’s later works, here it was seamlessly incorporated into a narrative and accompanying aesthetic style in a way that served a purpose, and was in no way gratuitous.

Further, like more traditional forms of art, Killer 7 left something to audience interpretation. This quality served it well, despite a handful of unfavorable reviews easily attributable to critics unprepared for the medium to evolve intellectually. (Stuff, Maxim – I think you get the idea.)

Fast-forwarding eight years to what many hoped would be a worthy successor to his inaugural North American work Suda has given us Killer is Dead, a game whose aesthetic aspirations hark back to Killer 7 as much as its title. Killer is Deadhas already been plagued by vestiges of its creator’s intermediate offerings. Its narrative is deranged, though less complex and engaging than its predecessors, and the game’s mechanics stand both to complement the plot and to satisfy gamers’ needs for responsive and rewarding combat systems. So it gives a strong foundation for theoretical acclaim. But the teenager inside Suda showed up, too.

Adolescent threads have found their way into Suda’s games since his initial incarnation as Travis Touchdown in No More Heroes, a game whose teenage fantasy revolves around an Otaku-loving, porn-and-wrestling obsessed loser who decides to become an assassin for hire. (No More Heroes was Suda’s first game localized after Killer 7.)

Despite being a 27-year-old assassin, Travis is a perpetually adolescent character down to his manner (uncouth) and his behavior (sociopathic), especially with regard to women. For Travis, women are mythical creatures that somehow remain entirely alien and incomprehensible to him throughout the game’s twisted narrative – it’s clear that he is simply unable to incorporate an appropriate understanding of women into anything resembling a socially well-adjusted existence. Any confidence Travis may possess in either game only comes from his ability to fight or from his Otaku-level expertise in topics surrounding his hobbies. In all other situations, his grandiose self-image deflates into self-consciousness and uncertainty.

As standalone character studies, No More Heroes and its sequels may work ironically, despite such a distasteful antihero serving as their protagonist. However, Travis Touchdown’s attitude has factored into the development of later games in Suda’s catalogue, almost entirely to their detriment.

Killer is Dead has been panned by critics for its Gigolo Missions, which consist of ogling sexy women long enough to build up the “guts” to present them with gifts until they go home with the leading man, Mondo Zappa. Without firing off accusations of sexism and mysogyny – there are plenty of those already – it’s safe to say that these segments are entirely irrelevant to the rest of the game’s content, and force players to disengage from its fairly captivating central narrative. There are only a handful of these optional missions, but still, how did Travis Touchdown manage to escape his No More Heroes confines and non-ironically compromise the integrity of an otherwise unified and focused work?

Wherever Suda’s agent of adolescence appears, the quality of the experience suffers. Lollipop Chainsaw was not written by Suda, but was dominated by the Travis Touchdown perspective under Suda’s guidance (thanks to a script from Troma-famous James Gunn). Lollipop Chainsaw is entertainment prepared by a third party for Travis to enjoy: a scantily clad high-school cheerleader, teeny-bopping her way through hordes of zombies and flashing her panties as often as possible. The uniqueness of Suda’s signature style, as presented in Killer 7 and attempted again in Killer is Dead, is entirely absent, replaced by the plainness of Travis Touchdown’s hormonal impulses.

This immature exhibition fails to provide the audience with anything but the ordinary thoughts and images that run through the minds of every preteen boy on a daily basis; we can find them everywhere. Suda has long since shown us worlds and concepts unattainable from anywhere other than his own mind. This creative rarity is what’s truly valuable to his potential audience.

In a sense, every Suda game has become a balancing act. One side of the scales carries the Suda who gave us Killer 7. This is the true, serious artist, the Salvador Dali of game designers; the one we need to pay attention to, who will ignite something new for us as gamers. The other side carries the heavy weight of Travis Touchdown, desperately struggling and squirming his way out from inside of Suda to wisecrack and ejaculate all over everything with which he comes into contact. Finally, game mechanics either salve or exacerbate the Touchdown-transmitted infection, giving hope to titles like Killer is Dead until the next Killer 7 arrives.

Shadows of the Damned, a grindhouse-styled road movie of a horror game that Suda enlisted the help of Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami to finish (a game that was published by EA, of all companies), created a greater symbiosis from the duality of Suda’s psychosis and Travis’s sexuality, arguably more than any game he’s made. Sex in Shadows of the Damned is overt and gratuitous, and even hard-ass hero Garcia Hotspur isn’t completely immune to his inner Travis.

Here, however, sexual imagery and suggestion are warped and diabolically sensible in the context of a journey into the depths of hell. The game’s sexual content is also subversive in that sex is never there just to be cool, and never holds any power over the protagonist or the player. Sex isn’t a distraction, but an integral part of the madness Garcia experiences on his single-minded quest.

Garcia even said it himself: “Bitch, I’m not falling for that sexy bullshit.”

]]>http://www.unwinnable.com/2013/10/03/sex-and-psychosis/feed/0Nullum Tempushttp://www.unwinnable.com/2013/03/29/nullum-tempus/
http://www.unwinnable.com/2013/03/29/nullum-tempus/#commentsFri, 29 Mar 2013 09:22:09 +0000http://www.unwinnable.com/?p=41759Sine Mora creator Theodore Reiker explores the consequences of squandering life’s most precious resource.]]>There was a soldier – a son of a poor peasant – who had never seen a flying machine in his life. It was 1961; the year of the biggest mimic warfare operation of the Warsaw Pact and only a year before the Cuban missile crisis, his Hungarian platoon boarded a Soviet Hound transport helicopter to cross a wide river. He was so afraid of flying that he defecated himself – and then spent approximately 40 hours in his own excrement before the drill was over.

My beloved, senile father-in-law was the soldier’s platoon leader and I’ve been doomed to listen to this story over and over again for two years now. At our monthly meetings his conviction is always that the anecdote is fresh, that I’ve never heard it before and that I’ll certainly enjoy it.

You’re killing time while time is killing you.

I’ve never stopped him from telling it. We’re all broken records. We repeat the same stories. We have an urge to reprise our jokes, conquests and victories. Just look around Kickstarter: well-known and respected designers, icons, legends, all repeating themselves.

A new space combat game by Wing Commander’s Chris Roberts? How about more interstellar trade from Elite creator David Braben? Or a new god game from Molyneux?

Even Bioshock Infinite…yes, it’s a new System Shock. If this isn’t about money, then the concept of the Buddhist Wheel of Life must be right: we relish chances to perfect our messages through repetition.

I’m no different. My nemesis, and the thematic center of my existence, is time. “Espousing the virtues of patience under time’s shadow is utterly futile,” mumbles Akyta Dryad, one of my protagonists in Sine Mora, and her words are mine. As it turns out, it’s impossible for me to separate the idea of play from my personal perceptions on the importance of time.

———

I was born in the now-defunct Czechoslovakia; technically a communist country, even if we knew from our books that communism is the Marxist heaven – a stretch goal of socialism that we haven’t yet reached.

We had our own version of video-related entertainment there: Russian Game & Watch clones with Soviet cartoon heroes instead of Mario and traveling mobile theme parks.

These trucks were full of “arcade” machines ­– bootleg Atari VCS consoles mounted into large wooden cabinets (running games smuggled from West Germany) and failed home computers like the Enterprise, Commodore Plus/4 and Sharp MZ-800, dumped on the region for a reduced price by their manufacturers.

We didn’t care. We had every game. Intellectual property issues were an unknown, nonexistent concept between comrades, so naturally all of our games were pirated (copied from a friend, who copied it from a friend who probably copied it from our filthy capitalist enemies, though we never considered this).

It took approximately around seven minutes for a game to load from an audio cassette and counterfeit games had the tendency to fail, though you usually only learned this after five minutes. The “Tape Loading Error” system message dominated my childhood. As kids we were more patient and more tolerant towards technology – we appreciated our chance to play with the future, even if wasn’t always the best use of time.

That is the distant past. In my teens and twenties I could play whenever I was in the mood – early morning, afternoon, evening, from dusk till dawn. As a father of three kids, now I generally stay up late after spending the evening with my wife. Usually I play a good three hours before going to bed around 2 a.m. My boys wake me up around 7 a.m.; I’m taking them to school. This night shift is the only suitable period to play videogames in my adult life.

There is never time, really, for adults to play games. Let’s examine the public perception of the medium: it’s not an art form. It’s not for adults. You don’t necessarily have to agree with everything David Cage is evangelizing, but if I’m playing games alone in the comfort of my own home, I’m only saved from embarrassment because paying attention to this medium is basically what I do for a living. No matter how contemporary and tolerant you may be, for a family man in his late thirties to simply turn on the TV and play games for hours is unacceptable.

This is not perceived as a book or a movie or an afternoon with beer and baseball. It’s less cultural and more juvenile in the eyes of our society. You have to play less and less. Of course I have many responsibilities between my work and family.

That said, I’ve managed to achieve 23 platinum trophies in the last 3 years, with Mass Effect, Fallout and Elder Scrolls titles among them. I’m not lacking in dedication to 100 percent titles like Dark Souls, I just don’t have time to do it – and I have to use what little time I do have for research on other (interesting) games.

Yet time in games is becoming increasingly invasive. You can’t escape social and mobile entertainment, with its burst sessions and free-to-play. They offer players that redemptive gaming experience – at a cost. In-app purchases are usually centered on speeding up your progress.

The average player willingly swallows a “pay-to-play-less” play mentality that’s just as lazy and conformist as these games are themselves. Time-wasting apps like this are part of the digital gold rush, forcing you into daily routines, enslaving and aggressively monetizing robotic actions. In essence, you’re killing time while time is killing you.

Between the hours-long triple-A epic series and the daily grind of the freemium space, there is apathy. Shadows of the Damned director (and general industry disruptor) Massimo Guarini says we’re ready for games that handle intelligent, adult subject matter in games that only last as long as a film. He’s right.

Spend 10 minutes daily for two weeks playing Temple Run or about the same watching Apocalypto. You’re spending the same amount of precious time from your finite supply (engaging with media about running away from pyramids, no less), but if you analyze the intellectual impression each makes, there’s no contest. I expect nothing less from game developers – tension, emotions, mature themes. (And interactivity in some form.) And if we’re going to take time making games as a team, it should be quality time.

I don’t know how much time we may have to make games. So, if a run-of-the-mill triple-A title takes three years to complete, I’m 39 this year and I can anticipate a long and healthy life that sees me making games until I’m 100, I only have 20 shots to make something great. Something that matters.

Verdict: game creators should not waste their chances on shit projects.

And players? Play as much as you can while you still have time.

———

Prior Games’ Theodore Reiker is the writer, designer and director of Sine Mora who is currently hard at work expanding Rotolla, his company’s first iOS game. Follow the countdown of Theodore’s 1001 favorite games on Twitter @TheodoreReiker.

Goichi Suda, also known as Suda51, is one of only a handful of truly colorfully eccentric videogame developers working in the business today. His first exposure to game-making was a gig writing scenarios for the Super Fire Pro Wrestling games. Before that, he worked as an undertaker. From there, he has made a name for himself as a visionary storyteller creating ambitious games filled with a bizarre hodgepodge of pop culture references – games like killer7, No More Heroes and Flower, Sun and Rain.

And, like many other big personalities in gaming (for example, Peter Molyneux or David Jaffe), Suda-san has a reputation for being a developer with big ideas who doesn’t always deliver on them. To correct that perception, he has enlisted the sage Shinji Mikami as a collaborator in Grasshopper Manufacture’s latest outing, Shadows of the Damned. The results look promising.

Shadows is a third-person action game that follows demon hunter Garcia Hotspur as he descends into Hell to rescue his girlfriend. Hell is extremely weird and Garcia is very, very rock n’ roll.

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Suda-san and talk about Shadows of the Damned. As he approached, he saw the button on my lapel and smiled broadly. “Ahhhh, Morrissey! I love Morrissey!”

We were off to a good start…

Unwinnable: Tell me about Shadows of the Damned. What did you want to accomplish?

Goichi Suda: I just wanted to have players to experience Hell. There are games that offer experience with wars and the future but you don’t really see many games that let you experience Hell.

Unwinnable: What was your goal as a designer with the project? What were you looking to accomplish in terms of structure and game design – how does it differ from your previous work?

G.S: So for my company [Grasshopper Manufacture], this was to be our first HD game. We wanted to make Shadows of the Damned obviously high quality and also ultimately we wanted to make a new action game.

Unwinnable: What were some of the challenges you had to deal with working with HD and high-end graphics?

G.S: Because this is the first time, I’m working harder at it. I think staff members have a harder time than myself. I’ve spent several years using Unreal at our company but I don’t think it’s possible to get used to the engine.

Unwinnable: All of your previous games were very stylized, like No More Heroes. Were you working within the limitations of the hardware, or was that creative choice?

G.S: That was a creative decision, I always look for new ways to be inspired. I always make the style that will fit well with the story that I write.

Unwinnable: Shadows of the Damned has a very realistic style. What is behind that decision?

G.S: To begin with, the game was for HD and of course we wanted to make Hell as realistic as possible. If we did a very stylistic game, Hell wouldn’t be as terrifying as it should be. We wanted to create a believable Hell, a realistic Hell.

Unwinnable: Tell me about the game itself, in your own words – the plot or the setting or anything?

G.S: The main character, Garcia Hotspur, is a demon hunter. At the start of the game, he has basically annihilated all the demons in the human world. Because of that, his girlfriend is taken by the demons and dragged into Hell. So he tries to go to Hell to save her.

Unwinnable: Your games are known for having a lot of pop culture references. What are some of the things we can expect from SOTD?

G.S: I think I have so much imagery and influences in my visual style, it is hard to narrow it down. Robert Rodriguez is one of the main ones. I cannot reveal too much at this point, it would spoil the surprise, but there are a lot of fun things in there.